Federated Media Adds Zemanta's Technology To Its ToolSet For Publishers

Zemanta’s inked a deal with Federated Media that could make brand advertising via blogosphere contributions scale higher, faster. Federated Media lets independent bloggers participate as partner-publishers in programs to build brand engagement. For example, for Dockers, Federated Media had publishers with a strong male following write articles around the theme of men crafting lifetime legacies, which were used to increase page-views and clicks to, and reader interaction with, Dockers.

Zemanta’s technology has its roots in helping bloggers with suggestions of tags, links, photos, related articles, and more to add contextual relevance to their content.It analyzes posts using proprietary natural language processing and semantic algorithms, and statistically comparing its contextual framework to its pre-indexed database of content to supply its recommendations. Zemanta content sources include Wikipedia, IMDb, Amazon, Flickr, Crunchbase, Rotten Tomatoes and Freebase, among many others.

Zemanta CTO Andraz Tori says that the big advantage Zemanta brings to the relationship is that it has lots of engaged bloggers as well as the technologies to ‘understand’ what they are writing about. “FM usually worked just with couple of hundred bloggers and we’ll be able to scale that to many more,” he says.

Now, publishers in Federated Media’s network can use the plug-in to enhance sponsorship opportunities and sponsored posts. “Basically, we’ll make sure the targeted opportunities are displayed to pre-qualified bloggers while they blog,” says Tori. “Then they’ll be able to sign up and participate in the campaign. Historically, brand advertising wasn’t scalable. We now plan to make it scale wider, while still keeping in mind specific topic targeting, high brand safety and other needs that marketeers have when venturing off the beaten path.”

Bringing Federated Media opportunities to Zemanta bloggers, he says, changes the value proposition of its technology. “This is a big step for us since until now our main value was in utility of the product,” he says. “Now, together with FM we’ll enable bloggers to generate revenue, too. ”

About the author

Jennifer Zaino is a New York-based freelance writer specializing in business and technology journalism. She has been an executive editor at leading technology publications, including InformationWeek, where she spearheaded an award-winning news section, and Network Computing, where she helped develop online content strategies including review exclusives and analyst reports. Her freelance credentials include being a regular contributor of original content to The Semantic Web Blog; acting as a contributing writer to RFID Journal; and serving as executive editor at the Smart Architect Smart Enterprise Exchange group. Her work also has appeared in publications and on web sites including EdTech (K-12 and Higher Ed), Ingram Micro Channel Advisor, The CMO Site, and Federal Computer Week.